Did the World Cup Deliver an Economic Boom? & Christopher Nolan Becomes Hollywood’s Biggest Brand

0:01Marketers, tell us if this sounds familiar. You invest in something that seems incredible, like millions of views, but then don't see any revenue. Instead, invest in what looks good to your CFO. LinkedIn Ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. Spend$250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get a$250 credit. Just go to linkedin.com slash mbd. That's linkedin.com slash mbd. Terms and conditions apply. Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, the World Cup is over. Besides Spain, who are the other winners? Then Christopher Nolan is a one-man Hollywood franchise.

0:41It's Monday, July 20th. Let's ride.

0:54Good morning. Hope you all had a great weekend. How long do you think running like your life depended on it? Would it take you to run a mile? 10 minutes? 7? 6? For Josh Kerr, it's 3 minutes and 42.66 seconds. On Saturday, the British runner broke the 27-year-old world record for the distance by less than one second. And he called the shot. Back in March, Kerr publicly declared his attempt to break the world record with Project 222, which is the number of seconds he would need to break the record. Then after training all spring in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he pulled it off running at an average of 16 miles per hour over a mile.

1:30Man, remember when breaking the four minute mile was thought to be physiologically impossible, but yeah, that's 16.2 miles per hour for the entire race. To put that into context, just go to your gym, fire up the treadmill. It doesn't even go that fast. Most trims max out at around 13 miles an hour because it's too dangerous to have a setting that high. There's two reasons he was able to do this. One, he spent four months preparing. He's a world-class athlete. But two, Brooks, his sponsor designed shoes specifically for him that made it feel like he was running downhill. I was reading into the technology.

2:04Kerr is a bigger runner for middle distance, and the Brooks team was like, he generates so much ground force. We made the stiffest shoe ever with a carbon fiber plate, and that is what helped him set this record. But with that in mind, I want to shout out the man who lost the record, Hisham El-Garouge. who said it way back in a 1999, no super shoes, no pacing lights, just good old-fashioned running. It took 27 years of advancing shoe tech and training techniques to take off 0.47 seconds. So both of them are legends, but shout out Hisham Elgarouj. All right, I want to know, our listeners want to know, Toby, what is your fastest mile time ever?

2:44I've tossed a 4.47 at them. That was back in sophomore year of high school. it is completely pedestrian in the grand scheme of things but at the time breaking five was a big deal for me and you know what let's give it another go sometime soon and now a word from our sponsor anthropic toby it's time we handle some hard questions head on yeah like why europeans hate ice cubes no like will ai take my job or how do i even know when to trust it i don't have an answer for you on that but i do know you're not alone those are real questions from real people Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude, heard them over and over in more than 120 ,000 interviews about people's hopes and fears around AI.

3:26Anthropic's not trying to gloss over these tough questions because their goal is to make sure AI actually works out well for people. They publish real research on these kinds of questions, even when it's uncomfortable. So if you've got your own hard questions about AI, and let's be honest, who doesn't? Head to claude.ai.mbd to submit it to Anthropic and explore how they are answering them. That's C-L-A-U-D-E dot A-I slash M-B-D You know what? Let's kick things off with winners of the weekend The segment where Toby and I picked two things That had a better weekend than Argos learning his master had come home I won the pre-show rowing competition, so I get to go first And my winner is the World Cup Which did its job of distracting us from the world's problems For a nearly six-week span this summer The actual winner of the World Cup was Spain Which defeated Messi's Argentina 1-0 in extra time at yesterday's final It's Spain's second ever World Cup trophy and a testament to their pure class as a cohesive squad that elevated teamwork over individual superstars.

4:25France's Kylian Mbappe, speaking of superstars, won the closely watched Golden Boot Contest, scoring the most goals in the tournament with 10. The vibes were not great leading up to the World Cup, which was hosted by the US, Mexico and Canada, featuring the largest field ever of 48 teams. And even when the matches got going, controversy was never far away. whether it was President Trump intervening on behalf of the U.S. team, sky-high prices, hydration breaks, or questionable refereeing calls. Yet overwhelmingly, you have to consider it a success. Just talk to any international visitor who's discovered the miracle of ranch dressing for the first time, or Vozenia, the obscure K.

5:00Verde goalkeeper who now has more Instagram followers than Tom Brady, or your local sports bar owner who had a line out the door for over a month. And then there's the more intangible wins, like the friends you made at a neighborhood watch party or being charmed by viral sensation Erling Haaland or getting inspired to join a rec soccer league with your co-workers. Toby, it's been quite a summer. We got to do it all again with the Women's World Cup next year. Economically speaking, we were promised that bars and restaurants and retail and entertainment locations would see this uptick in consumer spending.

5:30And you know what? We kind of got it, actually. Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan estimates that The World Cup generated about$20 billion in U.S. economic activity flowing into all those places that I mentioned. If you look at consumer spending, it rose 6.3 % year-over-year in June. That is the largest increase we've seen in the last four years. So clearly, something was going on in these host cities. Host cities did outperform in a lot of metrics. So even though it looked dicey and it looked like maybe these mega events don't necessarily bring the spending that they always promise, We saw an uptick in a lot of the actual meat and potatoes of economic data like consumer spending.

6:09Yeah, let's dive into one of those host cities, Boston, which hosted seven games at Gillette Stadium. It's not Boston, but it's close enough, I guess. The nonprofit tourism group Meet Boston reported that those games drove more than 20 % increase in both average hotel room rates and revenue per available room compared to the same period last year. Boston restaurants and bars saw a 20 % increase in consumer spending during the opening two weeks of the World Cup. We know that was 100 % driven by Scotland's Tartan army. And, you know, based on the previous year, not, you know, Boston's nightlife isn't really known for much.

6:44So any increase is probably notable. However, this didn't necessarily extend to all host cities. So Boston perhaps saw an uptick. But in Vancouver, they actually said that hotel booking was below in June and July was pacing, quote, pacing well behind previous years. And when these big entertainment events come to town, like, say, Taylor Swift's Eras Tour or the World Cup, you always have to think about tradeoffs. Because for every Scottish person coming to the United States for a Scotland game, there's maybe a person in France or another country that is just not coming because they don't want to deal with the chaos and the hubbub.

7:18So we'll have to see these metrics over a couple of months and years, see how the economy did during the summer. So it looks like a bit of a mixed bag. Some host cities saw a big uptick. Some said they were pacing behind other years. Some of the winners, though, to the beer industry. Remember, that was a big question marks. Alcohol sales have been falling over recent years. But beer, according to the Beer Institute, beer sales went up 5.5 percent. Forty five percent of viewers said they plan to drink a beer while watching. sports betting too goes hand in hand with maybe that beer consumption there was 50 billion dollars wager prediction markets did it very well uh kalshi said that they were seeing 10 at times the early year levels of volume on their trading platform so we knew that there was going to be an explosion in drinking and gambling we got that explosion in drinking and gambling as for some of the losers i'm so sad about the final because so much of the goodwill have been built up in america specifically around like, hey, maybe we should give this soccer thing a try.

8:18Maybe there's a reason it's the most popular sport in the world. And we actually did see that in New York City, Volo registrations, which is a adult rec league operator jumped 80 % year over year. So clearly people were saying, I will go try soccer for the first time, but then you get the final, which is the biggest game after this awesome tournament. And one team had zero shots in 105 minutes. And a lot of people raised the same questions again, like, ah, soccer is boring. nothing ever happened so for a moment there it seemed like we had a spark of a real thing of soccer becoming more popular in america i wonder if the final is going to dampen some of that all right so looking ahead we got the uh the women's world cup next year in 2027 that is going to be on netflix i believe and then in 2030 the men's world cup heads to portugal spain and morocco for the 100th anniversary of the tournament we got to get our squad ready in time that is going to be awesome my winner of the weekend is the latest movie franchise to tear up the box office was this a franchise led by a superhero in tights well it depends on who you ask but by most accounts Christopher Nolan is just a man a man that knows how to put butts in seats the Odyssey opened to 125 million dollars at the domestic box office this weekend and 264 million globally the biggest opening of Nolan's storied career it brings his total career earnings since Memento came out in 2000 to over six billion dollars the odyssey also reaffirms his rarefied status in hollywood in a sea of franchises nolan's name alone has become a box office draw he's got a formula at this point he commits to spectacle nolan famously shot the odyssey exclusively on imax cameras a first for a feature-length film he also prefers to lean on practical effects over cgi even if it means building a 60-foot tall puppet cyclops that munches on dude's heads.

10:06Plus, outside his dark take on Batman, he tends to tell standalone stories that don't fit into the sequel slop that Hollywood pumps out on the regular these days. All of it has combined to put him amongst names like Spielberg and Tarantino, where audiences show up simply because he directed it. Neil, the Odyssey is a smashing success already, and Nolan's brand is stronger than ever. Look at the poster for the Odyssey. It has a picture of a statue's head. It says the Odyssey. And then it says at the top, a film by Christopher Nolan. It doesn't have Matt Damon or Anne Hathaway or Robert Pattinson or Tom Holland or any of the other stars on the poster.

10:43It just says a film by Christopher Nolan, which shows you how he is a brand and a franchise unto himself, which is really subverting the Hollywood model over the last couple of decades. New York Times put it pretty clearly here. It said Hollywood spent two decades de-risking itself by betting on IP rather than people. The franchise became the attraction eclipsing the directors and movie stars who once drew audiences to theaters. We just had the fifth Toy Story came out and then Christopher Nolan comes along and we can talk about his filmography but says no I am actually the attraction. What he does best is spectacle.

11:15He puts butts in seats. He creates movie theater experiences that you actually need to go on a big screen not sit at home and that's why movie theaters absolutely love him. And you know who's kind of the Squidward looking out of his window sadly while Spongebob runs around having good time meme. It's Warner Brothers because Warner Brothers was his collaborator. It was the studio that Christopher Nolan did much of his early movies with and yet that relationship collapsed in 2020 because Warner Brothers was trying to make HBO Max a thing. They wanted to put out Christopher Nolan's movies on HBO Max at the same time as theaters and again Nolan is this big theater guy so he did not want that that relationship broke down universal stepped in said we'll be your partner now because for nolan going forward and they've gotten the oppen oppenheimer and the odyssey which are two you know set to be almost billion dollar movies and just to show how much these studios still value having even a little bit piece of christopher nolan paramount re-released interstellar for its 10th anniversary and earned more than 25 million worldwide.

12:16Disney plans to re-release the Prestige for its 20th anniversary. So they are tapping into the Christopher Nolan goldmine right now because he's the one making money. Okay, I need to hear your favorite Christopher Nolan film. So just to go through them, we had Following Memento and Insomnia, which were the early ones, psychological thrillers. He was experimenting with non-linear storytelling, which continued into the later years. We also had the Dark Knight trilogy, Batman Begins, Dark Knight, and Dark Knight Rises. That was a seminal moment for Hollywood too, because back in 2005 when Batman Begins comes out, no one was really thinking about superheroes, and he really legitimizes that concept.

12:52And obviously it's dark and grittier than the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Iron Man came out in 2008, three years later. But that was a big deal for superheroes, which dominated the box office for the next two decades. We have The Prestige, Inception. This is where he gets going with these original themes and films that really went against the grain of Hollywood, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet, Oppenheimer, and then the Odyssey and Oppenheimer really is, I know the Odyssey is maybe what was his biggest opening, but Oppenheimer was probably the crowning achievement because, I mean, just telling the story, a pretty dry story of this guy who no one had ever, it's a lot of courtrooms, no one had ever heard of anyone, all these Oscars and brought in nearly$1 billion.

13:34Okay, all that is to say, what's your favorite Chris Nolan movie? Tenet. No, I'm just kidding. That's not my favorite. My favorite is probably Batman Begins. that has such a Ra's al Ghul yeah I don't know why I haven't seen it in actually a few years at this point but when that one came out it felt like the coolest thing ever because superhero movies weren't a thing so it's not his best movie probably but that's probably my favorite just because it's just a special place and I was I was younger too you know that's always the music you listen to in high school was the best music the movies that you watch growing up those are the best movies and you love interstellar too so I I heard this take that interstellar is maybe the Jurassic Park of Gen Z because it is just that big sci-fi.

14:15Wait, let me wrap my head around that. I know it's different than Hacky Sack is the pickleball of soccer, but yes, I heard, yeah, like Interstellar is just that big sci-fi epic that a lot of younger people was a big seminal moment for them in terms of the moviegoing experience and sci-fi and what a movie spectacle could possibly be. So I think that's something to chew on. I'll give it to you. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with a story about a new Chinese AI model right after this. Toby, let's talk about bonds. Oh, for sure. So here's my pitch. We open on the Swiss Alps.

14:48I'm wearing a tuxedo. Wrong bond, and you would be terrible for that role. I'm talking about Vanguard bonds. They're institutional quality, and that's not just a tagline. It's a commitment to your clients. It means top-grade products across the board. The lineup includes over 80 bond funds. They're actively managed by a 200-person global squad of sector specialists, analysts, and traders. To learn more, head to vanguard.com slash audio. That's vanguard.com slash audio. When demand slowed for HydroJug, Amazon Ads rising star Hayden Wadsworth pivoted. When our bank account hit near zero, my brother Jake and I had one last shot to save HydroJug.

15:24So we engineered the Traveler, a leak-proof, coupler-friendly Tumblr. Amazon Ads enables a business to be able to expand their product shelf because of the visibility and the reach you can get. Each week, our new-to-brand customers make up about 95 % of all of our sales. Watch HydroJug's story at advertising.amazon.com slash rising-stars. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business.

16:04The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. If you're wondering why your portfolio was red heading into the weekend, an open source Chinese AI model is likely to blame. On Thursday, the market was hit with another deep seek moment, this time from a startup called Moonshot, who released a new model called Kimi K3 that sent the American AI industry into a tizzy. Kimi is the largest open-weight AI model ever released and goes toe-to-toe with the creme de la creme of American models from Anthropic and OpenAI.

16:42At one blind coding evaluation, Kimi K3 outperformed Claude's Fable 5, a much more expensive model thought to be the best coding tool in the world. In another example, ex-user Max Weinbach was able to recreate all of Mac OS 27 from scratch using Kimi's$40 a month plan in just over three hours. It is that powerful. While it still trails OpenAI's Sol and Anthropics Fable models in overall performance, reaching frontier level status, while being open source and costing a fraction of the price, hit markets hard as investors again started to question whether the AI buildout will require as much expensive computing hardware as previously expected.

17:19The fallout saw a major semiconductor stock index drop 10 % over the past week, while NVIDIA lost its title as the biggest company in the world to Apple. Neil, every time China pulls off one of these big open source model leaps, it raises the same uncomfortable questions. How are they doing this without access to the most advanced AI chips? And if they can do it without them, why are US companies spending so much money in the AI race? We heard those questions ring out with DeepSeek. Now Moonshot and Kimmy are raising the same. So this company is called Moonshot, and I thought that would be because they're taking moonshots.

17:52But no, it's actually inspired by the dark side of the moon by Pink Floyd. that amazing album. And did you know that if you use this particular model while watching The Wizard of Oz, it syncs up? That is a joke. But what's not a joke is these Chinese models. They are gaining market share. And what people are realizing is that you don't need to use these expensive models from Anthropic or Claude, these top of the line frontier models that are real expensive, but also are amazing just to do your everyday tasks. Some have compared it to driving a Ferrari to Whole Foods. Sometimes you just need a Honda Civic or a Toyota Corolla, which is what these models are.

18:28Just look at DoorDash. So DoorDash is one company. It uses anthropic models for cutting-edge tasks, but then they use Moonshot for lower-level workloads. So if you just need to get a lot of stuff done on the cheap, then you turn to these Chinese models. And based on their open-source, cheaper nature, a lot of companies, especially in the United States and around the world, are starting to use them perhaps over the higher-level American models and sending a lot of shivers across the stock market. The other thing that is scaring American AI companies is that China is kind of placing itself as the collaborative technology partner.

19:01Right before this model came out, Xi Jinping used a speech at a world AI conference in Shanghai to say that China is the open source AI partner that you want to build alongside. And why that is scaring the US is that China could eventually come to control the global stack if they are the open source, that partner that you go to, then companies and governments start to orient themselves around what China is doing in the AI race, not what is happening in these closed off, very expensive U.S. models. And if China keeps iterating at this pace, then the U.S. might lose its overall lead. That has been something that we've said on the show a lot, is that China is about six months behind the U.S.

19:40in terms of frontier capacity. Maybe they're not, because this got extremely close to reaching frontier level AI models as an open source model. That's the other thing that you just mentioned. They don't even need to become the best in the world as long as they start cleaving off market share by doing the more mundane tasks more cost efficiently, then maybe they don't even need to be at or exceeding what the US models are doing. So those were the big fears. Now, the reality check is that Kimmy K3 is very good, but it's not the best model in the world. So the U.S. still has its nose in front for now.

20:15So maybe that's the reality check that some people are saying. We'll see how the market kind of shakes out today. Obviously, there's other geopolitical things at play. But maybe that's one thing to keep in the back of the mind is that for now, open source is something that countries that are behind in the race do, but it's not necessarily something that you need to get so scared about that it's taking over the world and it's a much better model than anything produced here. Yes. Some have pointed out that once Chinese models get better, say, Claude Mythos, which, remember, the U.S. government, or Anthropic, also said, you can't release this because it's too dangerous for cybersecurity, so we actually need to keep this closer to the vest, certainly not open source or open weight.

20:54That might be the same incentive structure that the Chinese government pursues when it comes to these models getting as good at cybersecurity or hacking as Anthropic's models. So they might start reining things in instead of releasing it out into the world. So that's why some point out, like, don't get super spooked. Yes, but we know this is reverberating in Wall Street, and it's certainly reverberating in Washington, which has taken a more interventionist stance into the model releases recently by saying, hey, OpenAI and Anthropic, we need to review these before you release them to the public.

21:29I'm sure after this new release from Moonshot and others from China. There may be a lot of critics are saying we can't have this government intervention in our AI market. China is catching up. We need to release these as fast as possible to get market share because China is gaining. Moving on, baby boomers are upending one of the basic premises of the housing market, making home buying even more frustrating for the rest of us. No offense, but it's true. Typically, when people get older into a more senior age, they sell their house and downsize to a smaller one. You simply don't need as much space once your kids move out, it's easier to get around and more affordable.

22:03However, these boomers, they never stick to the script. The Wall Street Journal reported on the surprising trend of boomers going even bigger with their next homes. Instead of downsizing, they're upsizing. Roughly 7 % of buyers aged 61 to 70 said the primary reason for buying their new home was more space, up from 4 % in 2016, according to the National Association of Realtors. Anecdotal data back it up with one Merrill Lynch financial advisor telling the journal that of her eight clients who retired, every single one of them bought a bigger house. Yes, well, boomer upsizing still represents a small single digit percentage.

22:36Given how dominant this generation is in the real estate market, it's a shift that has meaningful consequences. Boomers make up 42 % of home buyers, the largest percentage of any age group. And they have mountains of wealth,$110 trillion that will soon get passed on to their kids in what's been dubbed the silver tsunami. How that wealth gets transferred, what shape that change overtakes is being closely watched by economists since it'll influence everything from the housing market to stocks to business ownership. But right now, it doesn't look like the boomers are transferring anything except a new grill onto their massive pool deck.

23:08Yeah, the silver tsunami is more like the silver teeny tiny wave that kind of comes and goes in different markets. This was supposed to help the housing market because more inventory was supposed to come online and millennials and Gen Z could start making their first house purchases. But Daniel Falk, the chief real estate officer at Valeri said, the largest generation in history needs to sell the most expensive houses in history to the most indebted generation in history. And that, I think, speaks to why this isn't coming to pass the way a lot of economists expected. Because even the small homes that are supposed to come online are out of reach for a lot of millennials and Gen Zers.

23:45And then, yeah, boomers are sitting on a mountain of wealth. One quote from the Wall Street Journal article that you mentioned said, I'll downsize when they put me six feet in the ground. That's kind of the mentality here. They want to build their dream home. They want to have the space that their kids come in a visit. So yeah, the silver tsunami is not necessarily that big of a wave at all. Plus when you're going to compete against the boomers for a particular house, I mean, they just sold a huge one. And they got cash. They can certainly outbid you. They already own a lot of the United States' largest homes, empty nest baby boomers.

24:20So these are people without children. They own 28 % of U.S. homes with three bedrooms or more in 2024. That's compared to 16 % for millennials with children. So 28 % of the houses with three bedrooms or more are baby boomers without any kids. And you could say a lot of perhaps what's driving this is they want their kids to come home and have a space for them. And they're building accessory dwelling units in their backyard. And they're doing all of these renovations to their house to make it more of a multi-generational household. And that's clearly what they're thinking as they age. It's just remarkable that we're seeing a trend of upsizing rather than downsizing among baby boomers.

24:58Yeah, even if you're not upsizing, a lot of people are aging in place. Because one, you're sitting on huge capital gains taxes probably because your house has appreciated in value. So you don't want to sell. And then two, there aren't even really smaller houses out there for them to buy. That is a big problem in the housing market is that there are not these – where are these magical smaller houses that they're supposed to move into coming from? There's not that many on the market right now. And then like the third thing too, is that if you want to remain in your home, you can just do things like remodel.

25:29You can have accessibility upgrades. Aging in place is just as big a trend as upsizing is right now. I got it. If my parents are any indication, I always come home and they're redoing something. Right, aging in place. They're sticking to that house for sure. Okay, it's Monday. So here's what you need to know to stay ahead in the week ahead. The U.S.-Iran ceasefire has completely unraveled and a return to wider war looms. Over the weekend, three American service members were killed in the region, and the U.S. retaliated with strikes on Iran for a ninth straight day. While energy continues to flow through the Strait of Hormuz, investors are getting anxious about oil supplies yet again.